Invited Speakers
Professor Robert Edwards
San Diego State University
Professor Edwards has held a number of positions in the US since completing his D Phil at the University of Sussex on microbial genetics in 1994, and has been at San Diego State since 2004. He is an expert in bioinformatic analysis of viral genomes within microbial communities. From his webpage:
“Rob Edwards’ bioinformatics lab at San Diego State is all about decoding life’s best kept secrets. These secrets are encoded in genomes of bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes and the viruses that infect them. We use all kinds of computers, from clusters to cell phones, to solve the most unsolvable computational problems that help us better understand biology.”
Professor Peter Nagy
University of Kentucky
Professor Nagy gained his PhD in plant protection, from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Plant Protection, Budapest, in 1990, and he has been at U Kentucky since 1999. His research focuses on small RNA viruses, in particular virus replication, using Tombus viruses, small RNA viruses of plants, to identify viral and host players in replication and to unravel the mechanism of virus replication; and virus recombination, to understand the mechanism of virus evolution.
Professor Julie Pfeiffer
University of Texas
Professor Pfeiffer earned her Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Michigan in 2001, working on retroviral recombination, and has been at UT Southwestern since 2006. Her interests include examining impacts of intestinal microbiota on enteric virus infections. Her lab finds that gut microbes are required for replication and pathogenesis of two unrelated enteric viruses, poliovirus and reovirus. Current work is focused on bacteria-mediated viral co-infection and genetic recombination and on how bacteria and bacterial metabolites shape the host environment to influence enteric virus infection.